Photographer, Artist

About

Lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Abdi Osman is a Somali-Canadian multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on questions of black masculinity as it intersects with Muslim and queer identities. Osman’s video and photography work has been shown in Canada and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. Osman holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, and a B.A. in African Studies from the University of Toronto. Previous work has been supported by grants from the Ontario Arts Council. His photographs are also housed in private collections and the Art Bank of the Canada Council for the Arts and his video art is housed at VTape. Osman was an artist-in-residence at the McColl Centre for Visual Arts in Charlotte North Carolina in 2010. In 2012, he was a fellow at The Interdisciplinary Center for Culture and Creativity (ICCC) at the University of Saskatchewan. Most recently, Osman gave invited artist talks at the University of Rochester, New York (2014) and the University of Toronto (2016), he held an artist fellowship at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany in 2015 and is current a fellow (2019-2024) at the Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON. Upcoming exhibitions include Variations in Black, Queer, and Otherwise, Art Museum, Toronto, ON , June 5 – July 27, 2019; Intimate Encounters ~ Animate Histories, Gardiner Museum, Toronto, ON, August 1-15, 2019; Intimate Encounters ~ Animate Histories, Arquives, Toronto, ON, 2020.